The Stress-Reducing Power of a Daily Task List

By Joseph McCaffrey, M.D., FACS

Here's a quick suggestion for relieving stress: Don't ask your brain to do something it's not particularly good at.

Much of the stress in today's world comes from having to juggle multiple tasks and responsibilities. If you try to keep track of all that in your head, you're using some of your brainpower to remember and prioritize. Which means it's not available to actually think. Not only that, you wind up with an underlying concern that you may be forgetting something important... or that you may not be doing the most important things first.

In short, you feel stress.

Don't do it.

When you're faced with multiple tasks and responsibilities, take a moment to write them down. Automatically, that frees up the part of your brain that was trying to keep track of all that stuff. Now you can focus your full mental capabilities on what your wonderful brain does best: problem solving and creating.

The simple act of writing things down changes the overwhelming to the manageable.

[Ed. Note: Joseph McCaffrey, M.D., FACS, is a board-certified surgeon with over 30 years of experience helping people overcome health problems using both conventional and complementary medical practices. For more information about the factors that empower people to attain optimal wellness, visit www.jfmccaffreymd.com.]

The Language Perfectionist: A Roundup of "Confusables."

By Don Hauptman

It's easy to mistake one word for another, especially when they look or sound similar. Here are five pairs that are often confused and misused:

• You are averse to something if you are reluctant to do it, not adverse. "Adverse" is correctly used to modify a noun: adverse weather, adverse criticism.

• When you boast about your achievement, you flaunt - not flout - it. You flout a rule when you ignore it, violate it, or treat it with contempt.

• If you really want to catch a particular movie, you are eager to see it, not anxious. "Eager" means enthusiastic. "Anxious" means experiencing anxiety or worry.

• Your kids may sometimes irritate you, but they don't aggravate you. "Aggravate" means to make a condition worse, as in "He tried to help, but his interference just aggravated the problem."

• The word fewer - not less - refers to items that can be counted. As usage expert Theodore M. Bernstein advised, "Use less for quantity and fewer for number."

A note about fewer vs. less: A literate friend of mine claims that he always shops at a certain supermarket because the signs, unlike those at competitive stores in his neighborhood, correctly read "10 Items or Fewer."

[Ed Note: Don Hauptman was a direct-response copywriter for more than 30 years. For his direct-mail subscription packages, he won The Newsletter on Newsletters promotion award for 10 years. He writes about the English language, and is now working on a humorous new book in that genre.]

It's Fun to Know: Lickable Ads

You're flipping through a magazine when you see an ad for a new fruit juice. No need to rush out to the grocery store to see how it tastes. With a new type of ad featuring a lickable panel, you can find out immediately.

The removable, flavor-laden stickers can be licked just once and can't be reattached to the ad. So far, this technology, which has been approved by the FDA, has been used to promote grape juice and toothpaste in popular magazines such as People and Rolling Stone.

Although advertisers are still studying the "ick factor" (how receptive consumers are to licking ads), new flavors are being developed. Keep an eye out for pizza, soy milk, and children's cold medicines.

(Source: The Wall Street Journal)

Word to the Wise: Constitutional

A "constitutional" (kon-stih-TOO-shun-ul) is a walk taken for your health (for the benefit of your "constitution").

Example (as used by Richard Elman in Namedropping: Mostly Literary Memoirs): "Kerensky was, I imagine, on his usual early morning constitutional."

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These articles appear courtesy of Early to Rise [Issue #2298, 03-08-08], the Internet's most popular health, wealth, and success e-zine. For a complimentary subscription, visit http://www.earlytorise.com/.